The "Ten Commandments according to John"

garycompton said:
Could they sense the future by intuition or psychic awareness?
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Since most characters don't have that form of awareness, it would have to be a major part of the overall novel, not just something that makes the writer's job easier. Of course, if you are talking about a society where PSI is common, it is a different matter. But in the other 99.9% of SF and Fantasy, let alone mainstream fiction, don't do it!
 
Thanks John, thats what I thought.

Sorry about all this extra work on a Saturday afternoon, have an extra glass of wine on me. Cheers!
 
About to go into the kitchen and work wonders for this evening's dinner. Jambalaya...
 
On the subject of "future dumping" (if there's such a term), is the following bad? That last sentence, I mean. It comes just before the end of a break within a chapter,

"Lieutenant Dodds, you're clear for take off,” a man's voice came over his cockpit's intercom.

“Yeah, thanks,” Dodds remarked. “I'll be sure to let you know if anything interesting happens; like we come across Dragon, hidden under a load of black tarpaulin.”

Please, just remind me I'm alive, he begged, as his TAF hurtled down the catapult and out the station. At least for just one day.

Dodds had clearly never heard the expression, “Be careful what you wish for”.
 
Again, you're moving out of the character's point-of-view. Don't! Every line of every page of every scene should be in a specific character's POV, and you should stay in that character's POV until the end of the scene. If you want another character to have the final thought, then it is a new scene and you must have a line-break between the previous POV character and the new one. But in this case, you as the author are addressing the reader directly, which is a no-no. By doing this, you are making the reader aware ahead of time that something bad is going to happen, which actually dissipates the shock when it does happen.

What you could do is something like this:

At least for just one day. As the thought passed through his mind, it was followed by an old phrase his dad had used: Be careful what you wish for... He wasn't sure if it was a grin or a grimace stretching his lips over his teeth.

That way, you get the idea of a possible problem over to the reader (not a definite one), while staying in the POV character's head.



Show, don't tell.
 
Not bad, I suppose, but what is knowing the market ?

Every book should be a unique experience. This doesn't excuse the major sins committed by would-be authors but, by their very nature, stories cannot be produced on a production-line, unless you're Catherine Cookson, and the less said about that one, the better.

While a story should flow, be properly researched, be grammatically correct and be free of spelling-mistakes, it should stand or fall on merit, not arbitrary decisions of editors pandering to a fickle public.
 
Tough. That is how commercial publishing works. I don't know one single editor who would not have killed to publish Catherine Cookson.

Good luck!
 
Publishers are pragmatists. The market - i.e., the big bookselling chains - rule. And they take what their customers will buy, so that is what the major publishers take on. Books are published now that would not have been in the late 80s, and some books that were published in the late 80s would not be published in 2008. Public taste changes.

I find your sneering at the fickle public distasteful, to say the least. And with that attitude to editors, I assume you don't actually want to be published.
 
Yes and no :)

Yes, because it shows me how I should be constructing my scenes and ensuring I stay within the correct viewpoint.

No, because it makes me realise just how much editing I have to do to my manuscript... ;)

But, no, your pointers are appreciated. Are you quite inundated with manuscripts at the moment? Or have you managed to get through the backlog..?
 
Ha! It's interesting, many editors and agents I know - and some authors - find reading and editing on-screeen difficult. I do it for around eight hours, most days. No problem.
 
Probably a bad choice of words, but family sagas, bodice-rippers and romances seem to sell much more than Science-Fiction or Fantasy, books that don't seem to make any demands on the reader's intelligence or imagination.

I always felt that the editor's job was to prepare a viable book for publication.
 
Viable book, absolutely, but it has to be viable in terms of the market. At a time when, in the last decade, new SF writers have included Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan, Justina Robson, Charles Stross, Liz Williams, Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Neal Asher - and Fantasy has turned up China Mieville, Scott Lynch, George R R Martin, Joe Abercrombie and others, I don't feel anyone can say the market is constricted.

But every editor turns down books they love personally, because their head knows they aren't commercial. The writing is great, but the basic story isn't strong enough, for instance, and the book would need to be rewritten word by word and lengthened by 30,000 words. At that point you make it clear to the author and their agent that you want to see more from the author and you'd be happy to discuss future projects face-to-face, but not this book.

The editor's job, as far as their MD is concerned, is to sniff out bestsellers - commercial publishing is about the bottom line.
 
Scarfy said:
But, yeah... eight hours of screen reading..? Wow.
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Which is why occasionally I wander off to a pub for a few hours and talk about anything but publishing over several pints of good beer! Luckily I have discovered some very good pubs since I moved last July!
 
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